Bitmap 3,4,5 specs

[Karlosoft]

Hi! I looked for them on google but I have not found anything. Could anybody give me a link?

[Love4Boobies]

What the hell is "Bitmap 3, 4, 5"?

[Brendan]

Hi,

What the hell is "Bitmap 3, 4, 5"?

Probably the BMP file format; where "3, 4, 5" corresponds to "Windows V3, Windows V4 and Windows V5".

@Karlosoft: You should be able to figure it out from the Wikipedia page (in the link above), especially if you look at the "External Links" section.


Cheers,

Brendan\

[Love4Boobies]

Hmm, I don't think those are different formats. I went looking for the specs myself a few years ago - you'll find the information you need on MSDN, obviously. IIRC, there are only 2 types - DIB (Device Independent Bitmap) and DDB (guess).

Not sure that's what he meant though, who calls Windows 9x "4" and XP "5"? (Even if the versions numbers do correspond)

[Karlosoft]

Yeah they aren't They are different versions of the bitmap specs.
For example version five allow to use an alpha channel

[Love4Boobies]

Hmm, I wasn't aware of alpha channels in BMPs. Apparently, they are stored as separate bitmaps. You should look into a different format though, BMPs take a lot of disk space. Even if they are probably the easiest format de (en/de)code, PCX is almost equally easy. My personal favourite is PNG.

[Gigasoft]

The structures are actually named BITMAPINFOHEADER, BITMAPV4HEADER and BITMAPV5HEADER. However, BITMAPINFOHEADER was invented before Windows 3.0 (it was inherited from OS/2, I think).

[bewing]

They are defined in WinGDI.h in any SDK release, or probably in mingw's include files.